After a Death, Keeping a Yiddish-Lover’s Weekly Conversations Alive

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Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, a poet and songwriter, died in November. Her chair remains empty at the Monday Yiddish conversation group she led as the group continues to meet.CreditSuzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

For a quarter of a century, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman gathered friends around her dining room table every Monday afternoon for coffee, tea and Yiddish.

An accomplished Yiddish poet and songwriter, she always sat in the same turquoise-upholstered chair by the window, ready to jump in with a Yiddish word or two when her friends struggled to finish their sentences. If they resorted to English, she would say: “Do redt men Yiddish” (Here we speak Yiddish).

That was so important to Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman that after she became ill last year, she exacted promises from her friends to carry on the Yiddish conversation group without her. She died at age 93 on Thanksgiving, and her friends have kept their word.

On a recent afternoon, a half-dozen people took a place at her table — the turquoise chair remained empty — in a red-brick house on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx. Surrounded by her poetry, music and paintings, they recalled the life of a woman who became a fierce advocate for the Yiddish language and culture and had many admirers who traveled from Israel and Europe just to meet her.

“We’re going to try to keep it up,” said Helen Gritz, 84, who spoke Yiddish as a child but not as an adult until she joined the group. “It’s not going to be the same, because she was the glue that held us together. For all of us, I think, it’s easier for us to speak in English than in Yiddish.”

Yiddish, which shares the Hebrew alphabet, was widely spoken by Jews in Central and later Eastern Europe until the Holocaust. David Braun, a linguist with a specialty in Yiddish, said that Yiddish is a Germanic language that was the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews, while Hebrew is a Semitic language that was the language of ancient Israel and the sacred texts of Judaism and that was revived in the past century to become an official language in Israel.

Mr. Braun, 43, added that Yiddish is now mainly spoken in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities while it has faded elsewhere as native speakers have passed away. Mr. Braun’s mother, Shirley Manuel, was a fixture in Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman’s group for many years until she died in 2007, and he has continued to participate.

Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman was born in Vienna and grew up in a city that was then known as Czernowitz in Romania (today, it is Chernivtsi in Ukraine). She was the older of two children of Yiddish-speaking parents who owned a fabric store. Her father, Binyumen Schaechter, was an early proponent of recognizing Yiddish as the national language of the Jews; he died in a Siberian work camp during World War II. Her brother, Mordkhe Schaechter, grew up to become a prominent Yiddish linguist and scholar.

Ms. Schaechter married a physician, Dr. Jonas Gottesman, and they spent the war years in the Czernowitz ghetto. After the war, Dr. Gottesman oversaw the medical treatment of refugees in the displaced persons camps in Vienna. In 1951, they immigrated to New York and later moved to Bainbridge Avenue to become part of an enclave of Yiddish-speaking families; the street was called “Bainbridgivke” by Yiddish speakers.

They spoke only Yiddish at home to their two sons and one daughter, and were active members of the nearby Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center, which sponsors Yiddish lectures, concerts and theater. In the 1980s, Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman started the “shmueskrayz” (conversation circle).

Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman and her husband, who died in 1996, also opened their three-story home to Yiddish speakers. In one anecdote she liked to tell, a Yiddish poet once tried to pay her for staying there. When she asked him why, he told her: “It’s a hotel, right? Hotel Gottesman.” “Everyone in the Yiddish world stayed here at one time,” said Shane Baker, 45, a Yiddish actor who is a member of the conversation group.

Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman never went to college, but could recite Yiddish, German and Romanian poetry and sing hundreds of folk songs from memory. In 2005, she was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of her poetry and song. “It was one of the highlights of her life,” said her son, Itzik Gottesman. “It recognized her profound influence on the younger generations of Yiddish poets and singers.”

Her son, a former associate editor of The Yiddish Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper in New York, said that he has continued the family tradition and speaks only Yiddish to his own daughter, who is now 25.

A few weeks before she died, Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman missed a monthly event at the cultural center for the first time that anyone could remember. Afterward, some of the center members came to her. They brought coffee cake, cheese and fruit, and settled in at her dining room table. “In our presence, she livened up and forgot that she wasn’t feeling well,” Mr. Braun said.

Correction:

An earlier version of two picture captions with this article misspelled the surname of a Yiddish poet and songwriter. She is Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, not Schlaechter-Gottesman.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Yiddish-Lover’s Tradition, Her Monday Conversational Group, Outlives Her. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe